Trump’s similarities to Putin are evident, but will we call him out for what he really is?

In 1964, when Barry Goldwater ran against Lyndon Johnson, a man named John A. Stormer self-published a book called None Dare Call It Treason. It accused America’s left-leaning elites of paving the way for a Soviet victory in the Cold War. The book sold 7 million copies, but Johnson crushed Goldwater in the election.

Now that the CIA has determined that the Russians intervened in the presidential election to help Trump win, the Cold War politics of left and right have been flipped. If Stormer rewrote his book for 2016, its thesis might go like this:

Beware of Donald Trump. Witlessly or willfully, he’s doing the Kremlin’s bidding. Anyone who enables him — on his payroll or in the press, by sucking up or by silence, out of good will or cowardice — is Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. This is a national emergency, and treating it like normal is criminally negligent of our duty to American democracy.

Trump as traitor: I can just imagine the reaction from the Tower penthouse. Lying media. Paranoid hyperbole. Partisan libel. Sour grapes. A pathetic bid for clicks. A desperate assault on the will of the people. Sad! (Note to the tweeter-in-chief: You’re welcome.)

As a kid in a New Jersey household where Adlai Stevenson was worshipped, I thought Stormer was a nut job, so I won’t pretend that accepting the modern inverse of his case is a no-brainer. I’m also not trying to recast my political differences with the president-elect as a national security crisis. Trump won. Elections have consequences. I get that.

I may not like it, but I’m not surprised that Trump tapped Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a crusading climate change denier and an advocate of dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, to run the EPA, presumably into the ground. Anyone who interpreted Al Gore’s meeting with Trump as a sign of his open-mindedness on climate change got played, just like Gore got played.

Similarly, I’m cynical but not shocked that Trump’s picks for treasury secretary, National Economic Council and chief adviser – Steven Mnuchin, Gary Cohn and Steve Bannon – are alumni of Goldman Sachs. A billionaire managed to hijack Bernie Sanders’ indictment of Wall Street and brand Hillary Clinton as the stooge of Goldman Sachs. The success of that impersonation isn’t on Trump, it’s on us.

I’m infuriated, but not startled that Trump refuses to disclose his tax returns, divest his assets, create a credible blind trust, obey the constitutional prohibition of foreign emoluments or eliminate the conflict between fattening his family fortune and advancing American interests. That’s not draining the swamp, it’s drinking it.

Every day brings a foreboding sense of having studied what is happening in the pages of the books of William Shirer and Richard Evans. Alt-Right might as well come out as the Hitler loving Nazis that they are.

How long will it be before they try to pass the equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws regarding LGBT People?

I wrote this piece back in July of 2016, and circulated it to a few folks for feedback before declining to publish it. It just seemed a bit too crazypants and tinfoil-hatty, with all its talk of totalitarianism and dystopia. In light of recent events, it suddenly seems a lot less out-there.

Over the course of my years-long engagement with smart people on all sides of America’s gun debate — from coffee shops in San Francisco to private suites off the floor of the gun industry’s annual Las Vegas trade show — I’ve come to believe that there are really only two broader ideological camps that people fall into when it comes to the right to keep and bear arms.

No, the two camps aren’t “blame the shooter” vs. “blame the gun” — that whole discourse is a sad sideshow, and I think both sides are probably tired of swatting each other with the same limp bromides (“the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” vs. “here’s what every entry in this catalog of otherwise unrelated horrors has in common: guns!”).

Rather, the real divide between the pro- and anti-gun camps is much deeper, and is rooted in their sharply divergent readings of the history of human relations. To use a ten-dollar word from my years as a humanities grad student, what we have here is a clash of hermeneutics.

Not only do both camps reason about the present and future on the basis of different interpretations of a shared past, but the gun control argument is so exhausting for everyone involved because it ultimately forces each side into the uncomfortable position of arguing for the truth of grand propositions that it actually hopes are false.

Despite all of this, I do believe there’s a faint glimmer of hope for finding common ground. But before we can discover what we have in common, we have to understand where and how we truly differ.

The Moral Arc vs. the Vicious Cycle

Any given gun control discussion may work its way through topics like hunting and other hobbies, or delve into theoretical questions of individual liberty and its limits, or cover the practical nuts-and-bolts of who really needs what type of firearm for which hypothetical use-of-force scenario, but all arguments over Americans and their firearms ultimately end up in one place: a dispute about the usefulness and legitimacy of the constitutional right of private citizens to keep in their homes the tools of violence as a last bulwark against tyranny.

How you view the Second Amendment — as an embarrassing relic of a barbarous past, or as a last-ditch deterrent against the rise of domestic tyranny — depends on the shape you see when you look at history: an arc or a circle.

Folks in the anti-gun camp tend to believe, with Martin Luther King Jr., that, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” These are people who have faith in Progress and Perfectibility, and who will warn you in all earnestness that there is a “right side of history” and you had better get on it. These folks aren’t having any talk of a hypothetical fascist dystopia in the US; to them, that’s paranoid fantasy from a bygone era, and meanwhile there are real lives being lost to gun violence right now.

The other camp, which I confess to being a lifetime member of, sees history as cyclical, with no real long-term trajectory. We take it as self-evident that there is nothing new under the sun; human nature doesn’t change; and humans keep re-learning the same painful lessons as species. To those of us who are members of the “human relations go ‘round in a vicious, bloody circle” tribe, the concept of any sort of long-term positive trend in the way we relate to one another is not only lunatic, but actively dangerous.

In this respect, despite the fact that I’m a Christian, I find myself sympathizing with the atheists who look on in frustrated wonderment as otherwise rational people bend the knee and send their petitions up to an invisible man in the sky, as if that would solve a single pressing problem faced by humanity.

Whenever my liberal friends bring up the magical Moral Arc to buttress their argument on some issue or other, I think to myself, “how could someone so smart be so stupid? Are they really willing to put their trust in this smug, secular eschatology? How can they believe, on the basis of a few paltry decades of mostly mixed evidence, that the great Moral Arc of the Universe will eventually, over the very long term, ensure that their ‘right side of history’ wins out in the end?”

Canada’s prime minister tells the Guardian why, in a world where populism, divisiveness and fear are on the rise, he’s taking the opposite approach

Ordinary people around the world have been failed by globalisation, Justin Trudeau has told the Guardian, as he sought to explain a turbulent year marked by the election of Donald Trump, the Brexit vote and the rise of anti-establishment, nation-first parties around the world.

“What we’re facing right now – in terms of the rise of populism and divisive and fearful narratives around the world – it’s based around the fact that globalisation doesn’t seem to be working for the middle class, for ordinary people,” the Canadian prime minister said in an interview at his oak-panelled office in the country’s parliament. “And this is something that we identified years ago and built an entire platform and agenda for governing on.”

But as he enters his second year in power, Trudeau – a former high school teacher and snowboarding instructor – is under pressure to show the world that his government has found an alternative means of tackling the concerns of those who feel they’ve been left behind.

“We were able to sign free trade agreement with Europe at a time when people tend to be closing off,” he said. “We’re actually able to approve pipelines at a time when everyone wants protection of the environment. We’re being able to show that we get people’s fears and there are constructive ways of allaying them – and not just ways to lash out and give a big kick to the system.”

Many people are reacting to the rise of Trumpism and nativist movements in Europe by reading history — specifically, the history of the 1930s. And they are right to do so. It takes willful blindness not to see the parallels between the rise of fascism and our current political nightmare.

But the ’30s isn’t the only era with lessons to teach us. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the ancient world. Initially, I have to admit, I was doing it for entertainment and as a refuge from news that gets worse with each passing day. But I couldn’t help noticing the contemporary resonances of some Roman history — specifically, the tale of how the Roman Republic fell.

Here’s what I learned: Republican institutions don’t protect against tyranny when powerful people start defying political norms. And tyranny, when it comes, can flourish even while maintaining a republican facade.

On the first point: Roman politics involved fierce competition among ambitious men. But for centuries that competition was constrained by some seemingly unbreakable rules. Here’s what Adrian Goldsworthy’s “In the Name of Rome” says: “However important it was for an individual to win fame and add to his and his family’s reputation, this should always be subordinated to the good of the Republic … no disappointed Roman politician sought the aid of a foreign power.”

America used to be like that, with prominent senators declaring that we must stop “partisan politics at the water’s edge.” But now we have a president-elect who openly asked Russia to help smear his opponent, and all indications are that the bulk of his party was and is just fine with that. (A new poll shows that Republican approval of Vladimir Putin has surged even though — or, more likely, precisely because — it has become clear that Russian intervention played an important role in the U.S. election.) Winning domestic political struggles is all that matters, the good of the republic be damned.

And what happens to the republic as a result? Famously, on paper the transformation of Rome from republic to empire never happened. Officially, imperial Rome was still ruled by a Senate that just happened to defer to the emperor, whose title originally just meant “commander,” on everything that mattered. We may not go down exactly the same route — although are we even sure of that? — but the process of destroying democratic substance while preserving forms is already underway.